>you can get l3 switches with enough cam for that and a few 10G ports for little more than half that.
Because I was confusing TCAM with DRAM; rather different sorts of things. (and that, I'd classify as a mistake of inattention. I made other mistakes in that message due to lack of knowledge, but, uh, yeah; I'm not usually /that/ dumb.)
Anyhow, uh, yeah. Looks like I also misunderstood what the parent comment was trying to do (/increase/ the size of the lookup table by breaking larger blocks into /24s, in order to reduce the number of cycles the CPU spends on the lookup.)
So yeah, in full? I'd delete my comment that I'm responding to here if I could. As I can't, I'd like to acknowledge my ignorance, for the record.
If I could rewrite that, I'd say something to the effect that huge amounts of effort have gone into making TCAM obsolete, and so far? well, progress is being made, but the progress isn't moving any faster than line-rates are going up, as far as I can tell. There are very smart people working on the problem, and they say it's a big problem. (my understanding and experience, as a sysadmin that also deals with networks, is that your linux-based PC routers can route something between 1G and 10G of line-rate small packets. Above that, PC routers can't cope with the PPS.)
Note, uh, I do have two spare E3 xeons laying about the office, and 10G interface cards for both, as well as (at least for a short while longer) two nice arista brand 10G switches, so if you are in the sunnyvale area, and you do want to test an idea or bench the current state of the art of software routers, well, it's something I've gotta do anyhow. I still don't have anything even attempting to route my new 10GbE Cogent port. (I've split off a 1Gbe connection using a switch, and plugged the 1Gbe connection into my existing quagga router.)